He worked for many years as a researcher in the US branch of the corporate research laboratories of Philips Electronics, the European Semiconductor and Consumer Electronics giant. His work there included research in representing and analyzing robot action plans, integrating reactive/behavior-based & deliberative approaches to action planning, multimodal user interfaces, and automated video surveillance. Dr. Lyons served as project leader for Philips' research activities in Automated Video Surveillance, and later as Department head for the Video and Display Processing research department, responsible for technical leadership and funding for this diverse group. Dr. Lyons is currently the Director of Fordham’s Computer Vision and Robotics Lab and Director of the MSCS graduate program.

Dr. Lyons has served on numerous conference program committees, has published over 100 technical papers in conferences, journals and books, and has authored 18 patents. Dr. Lyons is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM.

My research interests are in Computer Vision and Robotics, in particular for systems that operate in the same kind of dynamic and unstructured environments as humans. Previously I have worked in:

* the integration of planning and reaction in robot systems

* automated video surveillance, and

* vision-based human-machine interfaces.

I am currently Co-PI of a DTRA funded effort on formal verification for robotics:

Performance Guarantees for Emergent Behavior in Mobile Robot Systems
The objective of this research program is to develop the necessary advances in theory and software to build robot systems that can be deployed in critical environments in a safe, effective and reliable fashion. The approach in this proposal is based on understanding what are the computational characteristics of the behavior-based approach to robotics. Unique characteristics include: the necessity for some form of sensory-motor structure such as Schemas, the necessity for asynchronous methods of composing concurrent behaviors, and the conclusion that even simple behavior-based systems exhibit complex behavior when acting in a complex environment.

We are developing a succinct formalism that captures these issues, and especially addresses the issue of modeling the complex environment. A process-based environment model is being developed, allowing a shared vocabulary (processes) between robot controller and environment model. It employs the Port Automata model as an operational semantics, and a CSP like selection of process composition operators for process description. The emergent behaviors of a robot interacting with an active and dynamic environment can be modeled and explored with this approach.